"Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society." - George Washington

Apr 2, 2013

KKK/Nazis: The Rise of Right-Wing Militias in America (They Are IN The Tea Party)

Since President
Obama’s election, there’s been a surge in hate crimes, political murders
and assassination threats in this country. Right-wing militias are on
the rise in several states, and high rates of unemployment have further
stoked anger against racial minorities and recent immigrants.
Independent filmmakers Rick Rowley and Jacquie Soohen go inside the
white nationalist movement to file an exclusive report.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

ANJALIKAMAT: It’s
been a year since Barack Obama was inaugurated as the first African
American president of this country. His election was lauded as a turning
point in race relations. But there’s also been a racist backlash to his
victory at the polls. Right-wing militias are on the rise in several
states across the country, and high rates of unemployment have further
stoked anger against racial minorities and recent immigrants. There’s
been a surge in hate crimes, political murders and assassination threats
since Obama’s election. At least nine high-profile racially motivated
murders have taken place this past year.AMYGOODMAN: Well,
independent filmmakers Rick Rowley and Jacquie Soohen went inside the
white nationalist movement to investigate the backlash. This is an
excerpt of their short documentary White Power USA that aired in full on Al Jazeera English. The full piece is available on the Al Jazeera website and on the Big Noise Films website. It includes some disturbing language.

RICKROWLEY: In
this shed in the middle of the Arizona desert, the White Knights of
America are hosting a festival of white supremacist skinhead culture.
Here and across the country, white power groups say they are energized
and growing. For them, Obama’s election and the economic meltdown are
wake-up calls for white America and catalysts for the coming race war.
They say white pride is their only defense in an insecure and changing
world.

CHARLES, STORMTROOP 16: But
America is in crisis. I’m petrified whether I’m working the next day or
not. And it’s — this is all we got. This is the last thing we got to
stand on, man.

RICKROWLEY: Charles
is the lead singer for Stormtroop 16, one of the most popular bands on
the Aryan skinhead circuit. He says they give voice to a silent majority
that is afraid to say what it really feels about race.

CHARLES, STORMTROOP 16: This
country and this entire world is full of closet racists who lack the
courage to even say they’re even proud to be white, because they are
sheep, and they are being led to the slaughter, man.

RICKROWLEY: Like many in the white nationalist movement, he talks in apocalyptic terms about the future of the white race.

CHARLES, STORMTROOP 16: And
we have such a huge following of people that are so incensed about this
because I believe that they think that this is the ends coming, man. We
were born to hate.

RICKROWLEY: Skinheads
are one of the most aggressively violent nodes in a constellation of
groups that make up the white nationalist movement. There are an
estimated 30,000 hardcore white nationalists and 250,000 active
sympathizers in America today, according to watchdog groups. But white
supremacist influence may be far greater than these numbers suggest.

LEONARDZESKIND: They
are preparing for battles of the future. And unless we prepare for
those battles in the future, we’re going to get blindsided.

RICKROWLEY: Leonard
Zeskind has tracked white nationalism for decades and recently
published a comprehensive history of the movement based on his life’s
work. He warns that though the white supremacist groups may appear to be
marginal, they exploit and enflame racial divisions that run through
all of American culture, and they are moving from the margins to the
mainstream.

LEONARDZESKIND: Now
it’s a broader political problem than it was, say, thirty years ago.
And so, it’s a cause for greater concern. There’s a sense of white
dispossession among a certain strata of the white population. They feel
like this used to be their country, they ran it, and now they don’t. And
they want their country back.

RICKROWLEY: Zeskind
maps a network of right-wing organizations that is adapting in order to
expand its foothold in mainstream American politics. In recent years,
hundreds of new groups and websites have sprung up across the country
looking for issues that can make their racial politics relevant to more
white Americans.

LEONARDZESKIND: Particularly
with the anti-immigrant movement, the white nationalists have managed
to find a vehicle into the creation of public policy.

RICKROWLEY: White
nationalists see the anti-immigrant movement as a bridge into
mainstream politics. And ground zero for that movement is here in the
deserts and mountains of Arizona. Six years ago, right-wing militias
began organizing here along the Mexican border. They quickly grew from a
few vigilantes hunting for immigrants into a national phenomenon.

With the recession, illegal immigration from Mexico has dropped
off 60 percent in the last year to its the lowest level in a decade, but
it remains a hot-button issue. In November, one of the largest white
supremacist groups in America, the National Socialist Movement, planned
an anti-immigration march to the Arizona State Capitol. The NSM claims to have eighty chapters across America. We met Jeff Schoep, the movement’s new leader, at his hotel.

JEFFSCHOEP: Arizona
is the front lines. We have a massive illegal immigration problem here
in the state, so we’re here to take it to the front lines.

RICKROWLEY: As
we talked, Schoep’s men began to organize the caravan that would bring
them to their march. Each car was marked with a number 88. In their
simple code, eight stands for the eighth letter in the alphabet.
Eighty-eight, or HH, means “Heil Hitler.”

JEFFSCHOEP: America
was founded by white men, settled by white men, and it was founded as a
white nation. So we’ve got our nation to lose. They call us the fringe.
They say it’s a fringe movement, but I think what we’re saying is very
mainstream. We’re standing up for the American people, and there’s
nothing fringe about that. The membership has really spiked, especially
in the past few years. It’s more mainstream now than ever before in our
history.

CLIFFORDHERRINGTON: And this is our blood banner. This flag is flown everywhere in the United States.

RICKROWLEY: Clifford
Herrington was the chairman of the National Socialist Movement before
they tried to go mainstream, when they still wore Nazi uniforms.

RICKROWLEY: As we approached the State Capitol, he started to lead a chant.

CLIFFORDHERRINGTON: No niggers! No Jews! The Mexicans must go, too!

RICKROWLEY: Younger members of the leadership quickly silenced him and chose a theme better suited to a mainstream audience.

NSMMARCHERS: USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!

JEFFSCHOEP: We
are looking at a country now that can very well face another American
revolution! Our forefathers fought and resisted tyranny in this country,
just as we stand here today in defiance of illegals, in defiance of a
corrupt system that would just as soon put a bullet in the back of the
white man’s head! We stand here in defiance of tyranny like George
Washington did, like Ben Franklin did, our forefathers! This is America,
our country!

NSMMARCHERS: Sig heil! Sig heil! Sig heil!

RICKROWLEY: In
spite of their swastikas and Nazi salutes, it is clear that the
National Socialist language has changed. Take away the “Sig heils,” and
they sound like many other conservative anti-immigration activists in
America.

JT READY: We are doing it right.
We’re putting Americans first. We’re taking back our nation, one day at
a time, block by block, street by street, city by city. This is our
nation, which we built. We are armed. We are free. And if you want our
nation, you must take it from us. We are prepared. Thank you. Sig heil!

NSMMARCHERS: Sig heil! Sig heil! Sig heil!

RICKROWLEY: More
than anyone else at the rally, JT Ready embodies the link between white
supremacist ideology and mainstream conservative politics. JT was a
Republican precinct committeeman in Phoenix and a candidate for the
Arizona House of Representatives. His writing appeared on mainstream
conservative websites, and he regularly spoke at rallies with powerful
Arizona political figures. JT is a former Marine and was also an early
collaborator with the vigilante groups that patrol the Mexican border.
They call themselves Minutemen, after the citizens’ militias of the
American Revolution. Here Ready is in 2004 with Chris Simcox, the
founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps.

CHRISSIMCOX: Chris Simcox, founder of Civil Homeland Defense.

JT READY: JT Ready, candidate for Arizona House.

RICKROWLEY: JT
was a rising star in the Republican Party. But after Obama’s election,
he came out publicly as a member of the National Socialist Movement,
which he now proclaims proudly on his license plate. JT agreed to meet
with us, but he wanted to do the interview out in the middle of the
desert on Highway 88.

JT READY: What I’m fighting for, primarily, at this point is the survival of the white race.

RICKROWLEY: JT
says that white Americans have been dispossessed and sees America
teetering on the edge of a crisis in which their very survival is at
stake.

JT READY: Any event which sparks
this off — it could be during an election time, it could be the
assassination of a prominent leader on either side — things could erupt.
Now, within the white movement, we call it “RaHoWa,” racial holy war.
And I do believe in a racial holy war, and I believe that we are already
fighting that, except that our side hasn’t even begun to fight back
yet. So we’re trying to waken our people for survival.

AMYGOODMAN: We return to another excerpt from White Power USA by filmmakers Rick Rowley and Jacquie Soohen that aired in full on Al Jazeera English.

BART McINTYRE: If you look at the potential of violence and the history of violence, the potential is tremendous.

RICKROWLEY: Special Agent Bart McIntyre retired from the federal weapons control agency, the ATF, this January. As an undercover officer, he infiltrated a ring of white supremacist groups responsible for multiple murders.

BART McINTYRE: I mean, that was a belt buckle I would wear while we were undercover that we bought from one of the Klan rally sites.

RICKROWLEY: He sees a perfect storm of economic and political conditions driving a rise in white supremacist violence.

BART McINTYRE: The economics,
Obama being the black president, the Democratic-controlled Congress is
all fueling the fires. The numbers may be small in the US, but you know
there is an event sitting out there that could spark the movement, and
all of a sudden you could see those numbers increase exponentially.

RICKROWLEY: Special
Agent McIntyre is not alone in his concern. Last spring, a US
Department of Homeland Security report warned that right-wing extremists
are now, quote, "the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the
United States." The report’s most disturbing findings concern the
movement’s attempt to recruit members inside the US military, something
that McIntyre witnessed firsthand while working undercover.

BART McINTYRE: I mean, we were
dealing with soldiers there out of Columbus, Georgia, and they were
stealing military guns and explosives off the military base there. They
were supplying it to white supremacist organizations.

RICKROWLEY: Special
Agent McIntyre fears that the country could return to the violence of
the ’90s, when decorated Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh bombed the
Oklahoma Federal Building, killing 168 people.

BART McINTYRE: Someone’s always looking to be the next martyr. A Timothy McVeigh could happen any day of any week.

RICKROWLEY: In
December of 2008, Kody Brittingham, a lance corporal in the US Marine
Corps, was arrested for involvement in a string of armed robberies. In
his barracks room, investigators found white supremacist material, a
declaration that Barack Obama was a domestic enemy of America, and plans
for Obama’s assassination. At one point, death threats against
President Obama were running at record levels, averaging thirty a day.
These numbers have dropped off since their peak around the time of the
election and inauguration. But law enforcement around the US remains on
its guard for violence from many corners of the white supremacist world.

911 DISPATCHER: 911, where’s your emergency?

GINAMARIEGONZALEZ: Somebody just came in and shot my daughter and my husband.

911 DISPATCHER: Are they still there, the people who were there that shot them?

GINAMARIEGONZALEZ: They’re coming back in! They’re coming back in!

RICKROWLEY: That
was the night of May 30th, 2009 at this house in Arivaca, Arizona,
where Raul Flores and his ten-year-old daughter Brisenia were murdered.
Their alleged killers were Shawna Forde, director of an anti-immigrant
Minuteman militia, and her operations director Jason Bush, who has been
linked to the white supremacist Aryan Nations. Forde talked of starting a
revolution against the US government. And they allegedly planned to rob
Latinos they believed were drug dealers to finance their underground
activities.

SALVADORREZA: The
whole mindset of hate under the guise of fighting illegal immigration,
something that we have not seen probably since the ’60s or ‘50s.

RICKROWLEY: Salvador
Reza is a lifelong community organizer here in Arizona. He’s been
battling for years against the anti-immigrant and white supremacist
groups that target Latinos in the state.

SALVADORREZA: Their
little minds get to the point that they’re fighting this battle against
the invasion, and in essence what they’re doing is creating the
conditions for what happened here in this house.

Like I bet you that little girl played on that trampoline.

RICKROWLEY: There
have been nine high-profile murders by white supremacists since Obama’s
election, and the pain in the communities they affect is visceral. But
these crimes represent only a small part of the white nationalist
movement’s impact on America as a whole.

LEONARDZESKIND: We’ve
got to look at a bigger picture than just the narrow problem of racist
violence. They’re a constant pressure on the racial fault line in
American life. They want to set dynamite on that fault line. RICKROWLEY: Exploiting
America’s racial fault line helps white nationalists impact mainstream
politics. It also helps conservative talk-show hosts get viewers. GLENNBECK: This
president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and
over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white
culture. This guy is, I believe, a racist.

I feel like President Obama is just saying, you know what? RICKROWLEY: For
years, the anti-immigration movement was the vehicle of choice for
white nationalists looking for an impact on public policy. GLENNBECK: Why don’t you just set us on fire? Do you not hear the cries of people who are saying “Stop!”?

TEAPARTYEXPRESSANNOUNCER: All aboard the Tea Party Express.RICKROWLEY: But
since Barack Obama’s election, conservative media figures have helped
launch a new populist movement that white nationalists see as their best
chance in decades to cross over into mainstream American politics. TEAPARTYPATRIOTS: USA! USA! USA! USA!

RICKROWLEY: Calling
themselves “Tea Party Patriots,” installing themselves as new American
revolutionaries, conservative activists have descended by the thousands
on town halls, state capitols and in Washington, DC. The tea party
movement claims it has nothing to do with racism, but at rallies across
the country, race is never far below the surface.

TEAPARTYPATRIOT 1: Coming to a clinic near you.

TEAPARTYPATRIOT 2: And
I think the guy’s a racist. I mean, you know, he’s talking about how
he’s going to bring this country together. If he gets us any more
together, we’re going to kill each other.

TEAPARTYPATRIOT 3: What’s
the difference between the Cleveland Zoo and the White House? The zoo
has an African lion, and the White House has a lyin’ African.

JACQUIESOOHEN: But do you think Obama is a real American?

TEAPARTYPATRIOT 3: No, I do not.

TEAPARTYPATRIOT 4: I do believe that he’s trying to change the country in his own image, whatever his image is. LEONARDZESKIND: A
number of white nationalists noticed the tea party phenomenon and said,
“This is something we have to get into.” On their websites and in other
venues, they started to talk about what they needed to do to push the
envelope.

RICKROWLEY: The
Council of Conservative Citizens is perhaps the largest and most
influential white nationalist group pushing the envelope. The Council
keeps its membership secret but counts elected officials among its
ranks. It has dozens of chapters across the United States, many of which
have organized tea parties. The organization is the descendant of the
White Citizens’ Councils, formed to combat the civil rights movement and
preserve segregation. Today, its website identifies the United States
as a Christian and European nation and opposes integration and race
mixing.

GORDONBAUM: What’s
a racist? You know, I’m not sure what the term means, even. That you’re
proud of what you are? Well, everybody, I guess, is a racist of some
sort.

RICKROWLEY: Gordon Baum was part of the White Citizens’ Councils in the ’60s. Today he is the Council of Conservative Citizens director.

GORDONBAUM: Our
nose is being rubbed into the fact that Obama’s black, and we better
all recognize the fact that he’s a black man and he’s our president. And
Mr. White American, you’re going to have your nose rubbed in it. We can
do what we want, and we’re going to give ourself all kind of goodies.

The last year has been probably our most dramatic in growth,
because people are really upset with the direction this country has
taken. And we’re getting lots of young people, a lot of veterans coming
back from Iraq and Afghanistan, that want something done before it’s too
late.

CHIPBERLET: Let’s look at The Councilor of the Citizens’ Council of Louisiana. “Martin Luther King, a troublemaker, a liar.”

RICKROWLEY: Chip
Berlet runs Political Research Associates, which has been tracking the
Citizens’ Councils since the ‘60s. He sees a continuum between the overt
racial appeals of the past and the tea party rallying cries today.

CHIPBERLET: The kind of naked white supremacy that you see in the pages of The Councilor are no longer acceptable. And so, you develop other ways, coded language, essentially.

TEAPARTYSINGER: There’s
three words you need to sing with me, and those three words are “Take
it back.” [singing] Tack it back. Take our country back.

CHIPBERLET: “Take
our country back.” Now what could that possibly mean? Well, our country
is a white Christian nation. And the more we diluted our America with
those other people, the less it was going to be America. And the idea is
always that we have to take back our America from them. And you never
have to say “them,” because the only people being addressed when you say
“Take back America” are white people.

RICKROWLEY: At tea parties across the country, it is impossible not to notice that the audience is always almost entirely white.

GORDONBAUM: They
bring — invite black speakers to it, in hopes of attracting blacks and
Hispanics. And for some reason, they just turn their back on it, and
they’re not interested.

RICKROWLEY: Gordon
Baum put us in touch with Brian Pace, the regional organizer for the
Council of Conservative Citizens in northern Mississippi, where tea
parties have helped with recruiting.

BRIANPACE: Our
Mississippi website, it’s been put online in July, and we’ve had over
17,000 people come to it. Just like we put another website online called
white-pride.org, and that’s getting flooded with responses. It’s
nonstop.

RICKROWLEY: Pace
is busy setting up new chapters around the state and runs a side
business selling Confederate and white pride stickers and pins,
including many with slogans we had seen at tea party protests across the
country. When Pace canvasses for new recruits, he starts the
conversation on the economy.

BRIANPACE: The
biggest issues right now has got to be the economy, jobs and illegal
immigration. Illegal immigration is not even really a third issue; it’s
more or less — it’s all about the economy. So that’s pretty much driving
the growth right now.

RICKROWLEY: The
town of Ripley just formed one of the newest chapters of the Council
and organized its own tea party. JD Meadows is a new Council member. He
was receptive to Pace’s economic message.

JD MEADOWS: My uncle lost his job up here at BenchCraft — so did my aunt — when it shut down and moved to China. RICKROWLEY: Meadows
showed us the factories that have been closed down in the last two
years. He said that the town has watched the government bail out the
banks on Wall Street while its local economy crumbled.

JD MEADOWS: Nobody wants to see
the large international bankers get richer. It is a struggle. Most
people around here, whether they’re Democrat or Republican, liberal or
conservative, are fed up with the government in some way or form. RICKROWLEY: We
sat down for lunch with the Ripley chapter of the Council. We asked the
new members about the Council’s core issue — racial segregation — but
got a surprising response from Meadows.

JD MEADOWS: As the Bible says, a
house divided cannot stand. The same applies with the nation. If a
nation is divided, it cannot stand. The media plays races off against
each other, when races should the united for liberty.

RICKROWLEY: After lunch, Brian took us aside and told us that many new members join with what he calls “elementary school politics.”

BRIANPACE: In
a way, the Council is about like a college. You know, after you get in
and you start reading our beliefs and you start getting our platform,
and you’ll start growing more and more.

RICKROWLEY: The
economy, bank bailout and the war get people in the door, he says. Once
inside, the Council tries to educate them about racial threats to
America.

BRIANPACE: The
mixing of cultures, whether it be — it could be ethnic, it could be
religious, you know, it could be language. We want to preserve the
Caucasian Christian culture that’s made up the United States and the
South, traditionally.

RICKROWLEY: America
has changed. Tens of millions of whites voted to elect the first
African American president, and tolerance and diversity are publicly
celebrated as national virtues. White supremacists face major
challenges, but they are convinced that racial identity remains the most
powerful force in American politics.

GORDONBAUM: I
think it’s become more racial because of the vote. We’re not in a
post-racial America. It’s becoming more racial. Race has become a bigger
issue today than it had been in twenty, thirty years. I think the tea
party movement is the beginning of a very good awakening. And realize,
we only need to wake up ten percent of the people to win this thing.

CHIPBERLET: As
this right-wing populist movement spreads more and more anger and more
and more scapegoating, and more and more elected officials and media
demagogues encourage them, it’s more likely that violence will occur.

AMYGOODMAN: Chip Berlet in that excerpt from White Power USA by filmmakers Rick Rowley and Jacquie Soohen, available in full at the Al Jazeera English website.

Well, for more on this story, we are
joined now by Chip Berlet. He is a senior analyst at Political Research
Associates and the co-author of Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Chip
Berlet, what would you add right now to this piece that we — this very
chilling piece that we’ve just watched? You’ve spent time in Montana, in
Idaho. What would you like to add?

CHIPBERLET:

Well,
I think we need to get away from the idea of the word “extremism,”
because it creates the false impression that what is going on here is
really just somewhere way out there among crazy people. But the whole
point of this documentary is to say, look, there are these sectors.
There’s the center political sector, there’s these right-wing populists,
and then there’s these insurgent and revolutionary right-wing, you
know, Klan, Nazi people. And there’s a dynamic there that we are a part
of, all of us in America, a legacy of racism that can be exploited on
the racial fault line at any moment. So, people need to understand that
this dynamic is not going to result in the Klan or the Nazis taking over
America and having an armed coup.

What it’s going to result in is a dynamic
between the Republicans and the Democrats, for sure, in 2010. But more
importantly, what’s happening now in states like Montana and Idaho and
Washington is that immigrants and other communities that are being
scapegoated are under attack. And as the economy continues to wobble, we
are seeing more and more anger being directed not just up at the
government elites, but down at people who have very little ability to
defend themselves. And so, the Democrats’ idea that “let’s stir up even
more trouble and laugh as the Republicans get pulled to the right”
ignores the fact that, you know, the families that I talk to are being
harmed by both the Republican and the Democrat and the tea bag
movements.

ANJALIKAMAT:

And Chip Berlet, you have a piece coming out in The Progressive
magazine next month, and in that, you argue that centrist Democrats
should stop trivializing right-wing populism. What do you mean by that?

CHIPBERLET:

Well,
if you just say, “Look, they’re all crazy, they’re all nuts, we don’t
have to pay any attention to them, and they’re not real,” that does
several things. One is that it obscures this dynamic that’s occurring
that Lenny Zeskind explained so well, that there’s a struggle going on
in these right-wing movements right now, and white supremacist
organizers are trying to pull the tea bag movement way towards more
aggression and a more ideological position.

But also, I talked to organizers who said
when they try and reach out to white communities, where they have in the
past had some traction around issues like immigration or issues like
racism or even organizing around the political economy and the
environment, that they’re getting doors slammed in their face, because,
you know, people can hear the Democrats and — I’m sorry, but the Keith
Olbermanns and the Rachel Maddows making fun of their neighbors and
them, and they don’t want to hear from progressive organizers.

AMYGOODMAN:

Chip,
last year, the study that came out, or the report that came out, of the
Department of Homeland Security from Janet Napolitano that got fiercely
attacked by Republicans in Congress, so much so that she had to take it
back, talking about the rise of and the danger of white extremism and
nationalism in this country — can you talk about what happened with
that, the importance of that report, and then the pushback?

CHIPBERLET:

Sure. And first, I’ll bet you a $25 donation to Democracy Now! that you can’t go through the rest of the program without using the word “extremism.” I hope you win.

Look, the problem with the report is
exactly that. The report, 50 percent of it, was completely accurate
about the recruiting on the right in the military and the white
supremacists stealing supplies. All of that was accurate. But the report
went on to claim that the evidence that there was a need for
government, you know, surveillance and monitoring and intervention was
based on ideological concerns. So, you know, I may not agree with
libertarians, but most of them aren’t breaking the law. I don’t agree
with right-wing populists, but most of them aren’t breaking the law. So
the report was actually quite valuable, until it started to conflate
political ideas with potentials for violence. And we see Joe Lieberman
and his committee talking about this with, you know, “homegrown
radicalization” and “violent extremism.” These are terms used by the
center to marginalize dissidence on both the left and the right.

ANJALIKAMAT:

And can you talk about the impact of the right-wing media, figures like Glenn Beck, and what this does?

CHIPBERLET:

Sure.
I mean, what people like Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs do is they provoke an
even angrier response. They whip up this anger, but they point it
toward scapegoats. And their scapegoats are overwhelmingly not just
liberals, but people on the left — community organizers, Mexican
immigrants, Muslims, all kinds of folks that are out in middle America.
And their — some of their angry neighbors are looking at them as the
cause of this problem with our society and with our economy.

So, what you have is this problem here, which Sara Robinson and David Neiwert have talked about, in especially the book The Eliminationists,
where once you have a right-wing populist movement and you have
political figures in the Republican Party embracing it and saying
they’re the real patriots and you have media demagogues whipping up more
and more anger, this is a very volatile mix.

It is, in fact, without, you know, using
the term incorrectly, the mix that turns a right-wing populist movement
into a neo-fascist movement. And the political theory now about fascism
is that it’s a right-wing populist, ultra-nationalist movement that
turns into a more militant and aggressive mode. Now that’s — you know,
it’s not going to happen here. You’re not going to have a mass fascist
movement. But along the way, this anger being focused on scapegoats, by
the Glenn Becks and the Lou Dobbs and the O’Reillys, leads some people
to decide to beat up their neighbors, and it leads others to decide to
go out and kill their neighbors. And that’s already happened.

AMYGOODMAN:

Of
course, Lou Dobbs is no longer on television, though he could run for
national office, something that’s been floated there. Then you have
David Duke —

CHIPBERLET:

That’s like saying — that’s like saying a zombie is going to stay dead.

AMYGOODMAN:

That’s like what, Chip?

CHIPBERLET:

That’s like saying a zombie is going to stay dead.

AMYGOODMAN:

You
have David Duke famously saying that if Obama were elected — of course,
this was before Obama was elected president — it would be a, quote,
"visual aid to white Americans." How have things changed in this year of
the Obama presidency?

CHIPBERLET:

Well,
we’ve gotten back to this — it’s basically that with such a large
right-wing populist movement already being woven around these white
nationalist themes, it’s pulling the Republican Party to the right and
towards, frankly, a more racist stance. But it’s also providing an
opportunity for the organized white supremacist movement to pull people
out of the right-wing populist movement — the tea bag and town hall
movement — and pull them into a more aggressive, more racist, a more
xenophobic, more anti-Muslim and, in many cases, anti-gay and
anti-abortion provider kind of anger. And that is happening on both
sides of this right-wing populist movement. The Republicans are being
pulled to the right, and the white supremacist organizers are having a
heyday of organizing people out of the right-wing populist movement into
this militant, aggressive and, frankly, right-wing revolutionary
stance.

AMYGOODMAN:

And what do you think is the best way to answer it, Chip Berlet?

CHIPBERLET:

Well,
I think that if you’re looking at it in terms of a society, people need
to stand up and say this is way out of control, that whenever you have
this kind of anger and demonization and scapegoating, it’s very toxic to
democracy. And I wrote a report called “Toxic to Democracy” to explain
how that works.

The other thing is that Democrats really
have to stop this snide and smug and arrogant, you know, “haha, let’s
laugh at the rednecks and rubes” stance, because, you know, first of
all, the political right has out-organized centrist Democrats repeatedly
since 1980. So I have no idea why they’re laughing on the Democratic
Party side. And the other thing these inside-the-Beltway spin doctors
who say, you know, “It’s OK to call them the radical religious right,
the political extremists, they’re crazy” — you know, this whole theory
that came out of the ’50s and ’60s that these people are psychologically
maladjusted has been repudiated in social science. So, you know, there
are people being pulled into the right-wing populist and white
supremacist movement that skillful, progressive organizers and labor
organizers could be bringing into a multi-racial, multi-ethnic
coalition.

AMYGOODMAN: Chip
Berlet, we’re going to have to leave it there. We thank you very much
for being with us, senior analyst at Political Research Associates,
co-author of Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort.

Quotes

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